I recently got a new case for my system, and the same day one of my friends was coming over to hang out and play some xbox. I was in the middle of transferring my system over to the new case, with the graphics card off to the side while I was screwing in the mobo.

My mate (being a computer hardware noob) got bored waiting in my room for me to finish, so started playing around with my graphics card fan. He was spinning it the way it's supposed to go, but I asked him anyway to stop playing with it. He then decided to clean some of the dust off of pcb WITH... HIS... FINGERS! After I repeatedly told him to stop, he insisted that it couldn't possibly do any damage. (Keep in mind he's a total noob... He asked ME to help him build a pc because he doesnt know enough about the hardware.)

As he kept playing with it I ended up smacking him one and THANK GOD he left... After I finished setting the computer back up I plugged everything in the back and fired it up. It worked fine, until I tried to 'wake' windows from hibernation. It showed the boot screen and then bsod'd. I suspect that this COULD have been because I had my firewire card (the only other card I have) in a different PCI slot to when I put my pewter to sleep... This happened again, and then the graphics card stopped working completely.

I've opened GPU monitor, HWMonitor, RivaTuner and Device Manager(control pannel) and none of them say I have a graphics card plugged in, even though its plugged into the pcie and has the secondary power plugged into it.

In terms of trouble shooting, this is what I've done...

Put my secondary monitor (I use 2) in the port for the integrated graphics, because the BIOS realised that the graphics card wasn't working so it defaulted to integrated. Tried to set the output to the 'pcie vga card first' setting, with my main monitor still plugged into the graphics card. This still didn't work. I tried a BIOS reset, still didn't fix it.

I spoke to one of my mates who suggested taking the card out, leaving it for a few minutes and putting it back in, then rebooting. This worked, however only once. I left my computer on over night as I always do, and it was still fine when I woke up.

I restarted my computer this morning and the graphics card failed AGAIN. I tried the trick that worked last time of taking it out and putting it back in, but this time that didnt work. All I can do now is run 1 monitor off of the integrated graphics, and borrow another friends spare card to do some more troubleshooting... And if need be, get a new graphics card... /sigh